Saturday, July 24, 2010

I'll be brief today as I have a golf course to try and baby through another day. Today I measured the 2" root zone temperature and, as you can see it is hot! About 96 degrees in fact... Supra-optimal is what the experts call this... I call it something else (which I will keep to myself). Combine the root zone temperature, humidity and nighttime lows in the upper 70's and you can see why we struggle to keep things pretty. Improvements will come, but right now we are simply focused on maintaining a solid stand of turf.

The weather is supposed to break tomorrow and we will drop our daily highs about 10 degrees, more importantly our nighttime lows will be dipping into the 60's for the first time in what seems like forever...

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Mother Nature continues to keep us on our toes. This afternoon we recieved around 1" of rain in about 30 minutes while the Golf Shop guage showed nearly 2" (just about 220 yds north of our shop). After touring the golf course, it is apparant that the northen half of the golf course took much more rain than the south half! Crazy weather...

The deluge caused a rather large bulge in the 9th fairway due to an old clogged drain line. See picture and video to see just how much water was trapped under the sod!

As always, the heavy rain caused our bunkers to washout. We were able to start repairs right away and will continue the process tomorrow. Kudos to the crew for their hard work fixing our bunkers after heavy rains!

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

As I mentioned in my previous post, we suffered some turf loss due to "too much, too long" referring to the heat, humidity, and water on the golf course. Since that post, the humidity has pretty much left along with all excess water from the course, although the heat remains. Good news, right? Well not entirely. When I say the humidity left, I mean it really left! We have been experiencing ET's (evapotranspiration - a numerical value that refers to the amount of water lost during a day due to evaporation and plant transpiration) in the 0.3" range for over a week now. That basically means we have to supplement 0.3" of water just to break even, more to re-hydrate the soil. Currently, I am watering to the maximum capability of our irrigation system, about 320,000 gallons of water per night. It takes our system from 9pm to nearly 7am to put out this amount of water due to the supply situation at the pumphouse. With all of this water being used, I struggle to match the 0.3" of water.

Now to the irony... we have been seeing the worst wilt and dry turf around the areas where we lost turf due to an overabundance of water! I believe this is largely due to a compromised root system from the heat and saturated soils. So here I am watering the "wet spots" to prevent further turf loss! Frustrating to say the least.

We have been seeding into the areas where the turf will not recover and will continue to do so until we make it through the entire golf course. With cooperative weather I would expect this to be by the end of this week.